


It's More Courageous To Overcome

by NerdyMassi



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: (but not much), Angst, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Canon-Typical Violence, Graphic Description, Hannibal Lecter Loves Will Graham, M/M, Post-Episode: s03e13 The Wrath of the Lamb, Recreational Drug Use, Some Humor, Will Graham Loves Hannibal Lecter
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-12-08
Updated: 2021-02-17
Packaged: 2021-03-10 02:15:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 6,859
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27956753
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NerdyMassi/pseuds/NerdyMassi
Summary: Will and Hannibal have jumped off the cliff and into the ocean. Will has to take care of an unconscious Hannibal, and goes to a Coast Guard shack on the shore, looking for medicine.He gets caught. Will the Coast Guard help them out or will she call the FBI?
Relationships: Will Graham/Hannibal Lecter
Comments: 33
Kudos: 48





	1. Out of the water

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Halebop](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Halebop/gifts).



This is right, Will thought as he pulled himself and Hannibal off of the cliff. This is how it ends. There couldn’t be a future or a happy ending to his story with Hannibal. They both had to leave this world.

The fall only lasted a few seconds.   
The force of the impact with the water could have been enough to separate the two men, but it only made them cling to each other tighter as they sank deeper into the ocean, a red trail bleeding out of them. They remained embraced for a moment.  
As Hannibal kept his eyes closed and his grip on Will loosened, Will imagined that despite what his partner had said about suicide being an enemy, he might’ve agreed with the idea of them dying together. After all, it wasn’t exactly a suicide if they’d been fatally wounded in battle. What better fate could they have hoped for?

This idea barely lasted a split second, before the survival instinct kicked in Will. The salty seawater burned his wounds, Hannibal seemed unresponsive, and they were both bleeding out.  
  
They had to swim back up to the surface and to the shore. 

Will hooked an arm around Hannibal’s back and started to swim up, grimacing at the pain from his injuries. 

Will got his and Hannibal’s heads out of the water, only to be slapped by the icy wind. He gasped for air, panting Hannibal’s name. In between two shaky breaths, he begged Hannibal to wake up. The shore was not so far away, and Will scanned the area for a boat passing by, a harbor, a Coast Guard shack - anything to which they could cling. But it was too dark, and there was no lighthouse to illuminate what was waiting for them on the sand. Jack and the FBI could be there, waiting. People could be enjoying a night walk on the beach, people who would run from the bloody sight of Hannibal and himself, leaving them to die. Even worse, Will thought, they would be recognised, which would lead to Jack catching them both.

Will had no idea where they were or what was awaiting them on the shore, but gaining it was the only way out for them. So he kept swimming, pulling a hemorrhaging Hannibal with him. 

“We’re almost there, Hannibal,” Will said when he finally felt the sand under his feet. “Please, _please_ , open your eyes!”

Hannibal groaned. 

“That’s it! We’re almost there,” Will repeated. “Hannibal, can you hear me?”

Another groan, louder this time. Hannibal’s eyes flicked open, and his weight on Will got slightly lighter as he tried to support himself. Still, Will didn’t let go. They moved a few steps forward like this, their movement made lighter by the saltwater.

“Can you walk?” Will asked when they were only knee deep into the water.

Hannibal nodded, tried to take a step but collapsed. Will caught him just in time to prevent him from falling onto the stones.   
“I’ve got you, Hannibal, I’ve got you. I’ve got you…” he kept repeating as he wrapped his partner’s arm around his shoulders, holding it in place with one hand while the other slid behind Hannibal’s back to support him.   
  
Will was tired, out of breath, and his body ached all over from the wounds, his muscles were strained by the swimming and the carrying, and the saltwater made his mouth incredibly dry. But they had to keep moving, find a shack, a shelter to stay the rest of the night and tend to their injuries.  
  
They were alone on the rocky beach. No FBI, no one, nothing except for what appeared to be a wooden cabin. It wouldn’t have been too far away for one healthy man – merely four hundred and fifty yards –, but Will was neither alone nor in good health. Maybe his chance of survival wouldn’t be so slim if he didn’t have to carry someone… Will shook the thought out of his head. He tightened his grip on Hannibal and headed for the woods right across the beach. If someone were to come, the trees would hide them, protect them from the oncoming rain, and the solid ground would be more comfortable for them to rest upon than the rocks on the beach.  
  
As soon as they’d reached the woods, Will helped Hannibal lie down against a tree. He sat next to him and ripped his own shirt with haste and trembling hands, rolled it into a ball and pressed it against his partner’s bullet wound. Will was aware that it was a rather performative endeavor, given all the blood that Hannibal had already lost. But still, it was better than nothing. Will placed Hannibal’s hands on the bloody cloth.

“You keep it pressed,” he panted through the pain, “and I’ll go look for help, alright?”  
“Will… You – ”

Will shushed Hannibal and gently put a hand on the man’s cheek, who leaned into the touch.

“I’m coming back, okay? I- I’m not… I’m not leaving you. There’s a shack not far from here, there’s gotta be some… medical equipment or… something. I’ll be back, promise.”

He pressed his forehead against Hannibal’s for an instant, then left half-running half-limping for the coastguard shack.

The night was ending when Will arrived. The building seemed bigger now that he could properly see it. There had to be medical equipment there, or at the very least something he could use to bandage himself and Hannibal up, and treat their injuries. However, Will didn’t expect the door to be open, nor its window to be broken. He rushed inside. 

The door led to a room larger than Will had imagined. There was a stove, a table and a kitchen sink against a wall, but no apparent fridge. An office chair was facing a desk with several monitors all indicating different charts, numbers and graphs, on the side of the wall opposite to the kitchen. Will precipitated himself on the sink’s faucet, taking big gulps of unsalted water before he ransacked the place in search for medicine.

He found a bottle of oxygenated water, some band-aids, but nothing more in the main room. He rushed through the archway in the corner, which led him through a hallway and into another room. It had a shower, a few cupboards, and lots of shelves covered in all kinds of boxes. He opened it all until, finally, he found a box on one shelf that had “EMERGENCY MEDICATIONS” written in capital letters on the lid. This had to have decent bandages and gauze. Will was about to open the box when he heard someone cock a gun behind him. 

_Shit._

“Hands up!” said a woman’s voice. “Turn around slowly, and explain to me why you’re pillaging my workplace. This shore isn’t for tourists, so I doubt that you’re here for fun.”

Will obeyed and turned around to face the Coast Guard. The look on her face went from cold determination – she clearly had pulled the trigger before – to utter shock when she saw the bloody stab wound on Will’s face. The scars on his shoulders and stomach, not hidden by a shirt, did not do much to calm the woman’s stupefaction. Will was having trouble breathing again. 

“Holy shit man, what happened to you?” she yelled, lowering her gun. 

Will lowered his hands. 

“Look ma’am, it’s my friend, he needs help, and…”

His already irregular breath became erratic.

“And you don’t need help? Man, have you seen yourself?” 

“He got shot, he’s lost a lot of blood, please just let me take this box back to him or at least–”

“Hell no. You’re not going anywhere like this. Where’s your friend?!”

Will swallowed hard. 

What guarantee did he have that the Coast Guard wouldn’t recognize Hannibal Lecter and shoot him in the head? Or call the FBI on him? Or leave him to die, or… worse? And how would Hannibal react to a total stranger in uniform approaching him instead of Will? Would he even realize the difference in his current state? Or would he, somehow, find the strength to attack her? Should Will warn the woman? And while they were talking here, was Hannibal even still alive? Or had he died in the meantime? Oh God, no no no. Anything but that. Not after all the shit they’d been through. He’d rather have Hannibal lose a limb or two than lose Hannibal entirely. As time had proven, they couldn’t survive long without each other, their design was to be together. The Coast Guard’s mouth was moving but Will couldn’t hear, lost as he was in his own thoughts. 

Outside, the thunder roared. The lightning bolt that followed brought Will back to his senses.

Everything was spinning around him, and suddenly, all strength seemed to leave his body. He tried to lean on a shelf but only succeeded in breaking it. He was exhausted. He couldn’t possibly help Hannibal in the state he was in, the Coast Guard was right. 

“Sir? Sir! I can’t help you if you don’t answer. Where is your friend?”

Will inhaled deeply to try and calm his anguish before answering the woman. 

“He… He’s in the woods, about four hundred yards and a half away from here. I told him I’d be back, but…”

“Okay. There’s a bed at the end of the hallway. You stay there, you sit down, get some rest, I’ll go get your friend.”

She put her gun on a shelf, took Will by the arm and guided him to the bed. His voice broke when he thanked her. She went back to the other room and took the medicine box with her, and as she rushed out she shouted at Will:

“And when I get back you’ll tell me who the fuck you are and how the hell you got here!”

Will watched her go out the door – that she’d left open, again – and observed as she effortlessly ran to the place he indicated her. After she had disappeared into the woods, Will lied down and allowed himself a moment to rest his body. 

Not his mind, though. 

It was actively planning the next course of action. This was a Coast Guard post. The woman who worked – and apparently lived – here had to have colleagues. Will had seen a microphone and communications devices near the monitors in the living room. Once he and Hannibal would be out of danger, Will had no doubt that the Coast Guard would call her colleagues to keep them updated on shore’s situation. Killing her wasn’t an option, as it would raise more questions from said colleagues, and even an investigation on her disappearance. 

She would ask Will and Hannibal for their names, in which case, they’d have to come up with fake ones, which she would check – or she would describe them to her colleagues and see if they’d fit any description of missing people. Either way, this did not look good. 

Solution: cut off the phone and electrical devices, and pretend a blackout, blame the storm outside. Time to get to work.

Will groaned in pain as he tried to stand up. He scanned the hallway for an electric counter, walked up to it, opened it, and turned it off and on again multiple times in a row, until he heard the sparks of fuses going off in the living room. There probably had been cleaner, more discreet ways to cut the house’s power off, but Will was too feverish to think about that. 

He limped towards the living room to check if his plan had worked. He tried to turn the monitors on one by one, none of them responded. Same for the computer. He took the phone in hand and typed a random number, pressed the call button – once again, nothing. Will sighed.   
  
That way, the coastguard wouldn’t be able to contact her colleagues and Will and Hannibal would appear completely innocent. Well, “completely” was a bit of a stretch, given that they’d arrived on the shore covered in blood and severe wounds that were obviously from a fight with someone – who wasn’t with them. So no, not “completely innocent”, but innocent enough for her not to call the police on them. An ambulance maybe, at most. 

Will sat on the desk’s chair and stared out the door, on the lookout for any movement from the woods or the beach. 

On the lookout for the Coast Guard to bring Hannibal back to him.


	2. - An ordinary day -

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yes I said I would update on Monday and it's only Sunday but shhhhhh

Amina had almost no work to do today. She was to monitor the sea and hail the few boats that lost their way, as always, and report anything out of the ordinary to her superior officers. But nothing out of the ordinary ever happened on this beach. Even boats adrift were rare. 

She sat up from her desk, rolled herself a joint and went out to smoke. If she was to spend all day sitting in front of boring-ass monitors, might as well make it fun.

She took another puff from her spliff, wondering why the hell she’d accepted this so-called “promotion”. She’d left her comfortable job monitoring cruise ships in pretty harbor cities to live on this god forsaken island in the middle of nowhere ten months ago. She started to regret her decision about three weeks in. 

Sure, she earned more money here than on the mainland, but what was the fucking point if she had no stores around and no internet to shop online? Hell she was even sure that that island wasn’t on any maps, so even if she’d had an internet connection here, she wouldn’t even have been able to order anything online. 

Good thing she’d packed her weed before leaving home.  
  
Cold raindrops fell on her face, slowly at first, then more and more until it was truly raining cats and dogs. Fucking great. Now she had to get back inside to finish her joint and the whole shack would smell of cannabis for at least two weeks, in addition to the permanent smell of humidity infiltrated wood. She rolled her eyes and headed back inside. 

The door was still open, the wind hadn’t slammed it shut. Good. It’d happened to her last week, and she’d had to break the door’s window to get back in. 

Something alerted her, though. There was an unusual smell in the house, and wet footprints traced a strange path on the floor. 

Someone else was here. 

Amina crushed her joint on her palm, deciding that if something out of the ordinary finally happened, she’d better be sober. Quietly, she got her gun out of her belt, pointing it right in front of her to whomever trespassed here. Noise was coming from her bathroom – well, “improvised shower room” was a more accurate description. 

The intruder was searching the house for something, clearly, but what would they be looking for in her bathroom? All she had in there was a bunch of meds her boss recommended her to take in case some unfortunate sailor had been in a shipwreck or if Amina got a cold. 

She cocked her gun, and walked in on a hectic shirtless man thinking he could get away with stealing her medications. Fuck this guy. She ordered him to put his hands up and turn around. 

Amina couldn’t believe what she was seeing. Had she smoked too much weed? Was she hallucinating or was something incredible and weird _actually_ happening?  
  
This guy was pissing blood from a gash on his cheek that looked way too much like he’d been stabbed in the face. The meds robbery made more sense now. He had a rather disconcerting scar the length of his abdomen, and bullet scars on his shoulders. Damn. He looked about fifteen to twenty years younger than her, yet he seemed already much more scarred by life than she’d ever been. Who the fuck was this man? 

He started talking about a friend of his, who was apparently in a worse state than him. The more this poor sod talked, the more this situation seemed out there to Amina. But one thing was clear, this guy was desperate to go back to help his companion, and he was completely oblivious to the fact that he could barely stand up himself. He needed assistance. 

She lowered her gun. 

He lowered his hands.

Amina asked the intruder where his friend was. The man was all shaky and gasping for air in-between words, and seemed on the verge of bursting into sobs. He didn’t respond when she asked for his or his friend’s name and, just for a moment there, Amina thought he was having a stroke and that she would soon have a corpse on her hands. Again.

The noise of the storm breaking outside seemed to wake him up, though. She asked him again where his friend was, gentler and slower this time. He mumbled something about the woods, having to go back, and that his friend was four hundred and fifty yards away. Useful information, good. It was practically next door. In fact it was closer than the next door because this shack was the only place with a door on this damn island.

She put her gun on a shelf, led the man to the bed in the hallway, reassured him that she would go find his friend and bring him back safely. All he had to do in the meantime was to get some rest. She thought he would actually start crying when he uttered the words “thank you”. 

Amina got her emergency kit with her and ran out, but not before she yelled at that wounded man that they would have a few things to talk about when she gets back.

It barely took her five minutes to get to the woods, and she immediately encountered the “friend”. He seemed to be about her age, maybe three to five years younger too, give or take. His eyes were half-closed and weren’t looking at anything. And, just like the other guy, he was drenched in blood. His hands pressing some kind of cloth on the right side of his abdomen. So that was what had happened to that other man’s shirt, then. 

So. Bullet wound. Probably shattered his intestines or something. First, she was to make sure the victim was still alive.

“Sir?” she asked, “Can you hear me sir?”

The man made an effort to look at her. Good, he was still conscious. Now she had to keep him that way. While putting her emergency kit down, she kept talking. 

“I’m the Coast Guard. My name is Amina, what’s yours?”  
No answer. 

Okay…

“…Your friend sent me here? Small shirtless guy, curly hair, looking like a bloody mess?”

Now that got a reaction out of him. He mumbled something and tried to straighten himself up but Amina stopped him.   
“Don’t move man, it’ll get worse.”

“H-how is he?…”

“He’s safe. He told me you got shot, so now I’m going to check if the bullet is still inside you and if it’s touched any vital organs. Is that alright with you?”

He nodded, and let go of the bloodstained cloth he’d kept pressed against the wound. Amina took up a pair of scissors from her kit and cut through the man’s shirt. It surprisingly did not look as bad as she had expected. It was a gunshot wound, sure, so it was gory and fucking disgusting, but the bleeding was external, which meant a lower death chance for the guy. Stabbyface-Guy would be happy about that. 

Amina cussed at the rain for the fifteen minutes she spent cleaning the wound with medicinal alcohol. She had warned the man that it would sting a bit – though he probably didn’t care about it after getting shot. She then ordered him to hold the gauze in place while she wrapped the bandages around his abdomen. 

Once she was done with the dressings, she got up and looked around for a wooden staff, maybe a fallen branch, that the guy could use as a crutch. The one she found wasn’t too wonky, and would likely do the trick. Amina went to put the staff against a nearby tree, effortlessly pulled the man up on his feet and handed him the staff. 

Amina’s brain boiled with questions. Who were these men? Why were they on this island? How did they get hurt? Were they actually friends or had they done that to each other? No, that was stupid, they truly seemed to care about one another.

The man she was tending to seemed oddly familiar to her, had she met him before? Or seen him somewhere? Something on her patient’s face was telling Amina that it would be wiser not to ask any question. 

As she walked him through the beach and towards her shack, she analyzed this situation. Two wounded strangers had arrived on her island, undetected by her monitors, in the middle of a storm. Neither of them had told her their names, yet. All of which meant that: a) they’d come here swimming, no boat, b) they’d been attacked by someone, and somehow got rid of the assailant before escaping by the sea and c) they did not want to be recognized by name. 

There was something incredibly fishy about all of this, and she was so excited to find out what it was. For the first time in ten fucking months, Amina finally had interesting workday. 

She couldn’t wait to tell her boss about it.


	3. Into the woods

The Coast Guard opened the door to the shack, and made way for Hannibal to enter first. As soon as he got in, he saw Will on the other side of the room, slouching on a chair, half asleep. Hannibal felt immediately lighter at the sight of him, despite his fatigue and the stinging pain in his abdomen.

Amina slammed the door shut behind her, and Will woke up with a little jolt at the sound.

He rushed towards Hannibal almost instantly, nearly tripping over himself. Their eyes met, and Will did not look away. He gave Hannibal the tiniest hint of a smile.

“You’ve made it” he said before embracing Hannibal, who let go of his staff to hug Will back.

“Sadly, I’m afraid your shirt did not.”

Will laughed softly against Hannibal’s shoulder. Both men could feel the Coast Guard’s gaze on them as she realized _what_ kind of friends they were.

Hannibal slid his hand from the back of Will’s head to his unscathed cheek, pulling away from him just enough to get a better look at his face.  
Will hadn’t disinfected his wound since he’d arrived at the Coast Guard shack. The view of the blood on his beloved’s face, reminded Hannibal that Will had fought to help him, to save him from the dragon, when he could’ve just let him die. Will could have put his drink down and left. He could have gone back to his respectable, if boring, life with his wife and child, and the dogs he loved so much. But he had chosen to stay and fight. In a way, it was a testament to Will’s love for Hannibal, to his commitment to their relationship. The battle they’d fought had pushed Will to finally embrace the darkness of his own.

And yet, Hannibal couldn’t help but feel a pang of ire in his guts thinking that Francis Dolarhyde had dared spilling Will’s blood, that the precious red fluid that pumped life through his veins had been wasted by this man. That someone from the outside had hurt Will. And that if it had happened once, it could happen twice.

No. This wouldn’t happen again.

He’d sooner snap Will’s neck – quick and painless –, and endure the pain of his absence than have someone else torture him. His preferred choice would be to avoid both situations altogether, if possible. Hannibal’s world was brighter with Will Graham in it, and they’d finally found each other, after years of chase.

Will must have had understood what was running through his head, because he put his hand on Hannibal’s and quietly said, his bright blue eyes holding his gaze:

“I’m okay.”

“Will you let me clean this?”

“You can barely stand up. I can handle this, take care of yourself first.”

Hannibal would have argued with Will, but his own wound did hurt. He sighed, then held his beloved close again. He breathed in his scent of saltwater, blood and sweat, enjoying the moment. It wasn’t every day that he’d get to hold Will tight against him, and Hannibal had dreamt of it a countless number of times during his three years of self-imposed imprisonment. He’d dreamt of the weight of Will’s head resting upon his shoulder, just as it was in this moment.

He never wanted to let go of Will, but the sound of Amina’s voice brought them both back to reality. They reluctantly pulled away from each other.

If they were out of the water, they were not out of the woods.

“Hum, I’m sorry to break up such an intimate moment guys but uh…” she sounded embarrassed. “I rarely have visitors here if you hadn’t noticed, and I’ve got an awful lot of things to deal with right now." 

She stared at them for a few seconds, then ordered them to “wait a minute” as she went up to a crank on one the wooden wall and manually rotated it. The whole shack vibrated from the activation of mechanical gears inside the walls. Amina seemed unfazed by it.

Hannibal and Will stared at the ceiling as a large square piece of wood detached from it, and slowly went down to their level. It was a bed, with a mattress and some very, very old sheets on it, judging by the smell. The frame was held together by stiff ropes of metal, related to a pulley system in the ceiling. Hannibal made a mental note to later compliment the host on her ingenuity. Her house didn’t look comfortable and lacked decoration, but it _was practical_.

“There”, Amina said. “You should both lie down instead of standing like that.” she looked at Will, bit her lips and frowned a little before she relaxed the muscles on her face. “You should really clean that injury on your face though, man.”

Hannibal lied down, happy to oblige. Not that he would admit to it out loud, but he was exhausted and in terrible pain, and eager to get some well needed rest.  
He looked at Will on his right, as he took the alcoholic solution and gauze handed to him by Amina, and sat on the bed, his back turned to Hannibal. The woman put the emergency kit down, beside the bed.

“Thank you, ma'am,” Will said.

“My name’s…”

“Amina”, Hannibal cut her off.

“Yeah” she replied, “He’s got a good memory, this one. Although… I’m not sure mine is. What did you say your names were, again? Can’t keep calling you ‘guys’ and ‘man’.”

Will replied before Hannibal could, feigning a confused air.  
“Amina, we’ve been through a lot today and… can we talk about this later? My friend and I really need to rest.”

The Coast Guard seemed disappointed.

“Yeah, sure. I’ll… go back to work, then.”

Amina paused for a second, then added:

“Gotta tell you, though, my job is to monitor the shore and the island, and…”

The end of her sentence got covered by the sound of the thunder outside. She gave an annoyed look at the window, then shrugged and left the room through the hallway. Hannibal briefly wondered what she was up to, before bringing his attention back to Will.

He was breathing heavily as he kept the alcohol soaked gauze on his cheek. Hannibal straightened himself up, flinching at the sharp pain in his abdomen. He ignored it and moved closer to Will. He ran a hand along his back and on his shoulder, then gently moved Will’s hand away from his face.

“I told you to rest.” Will objected.  
“Please, Will. Let me.”

Hannibal wasn’t asking a question. This was an order from a former surgeon who couldn’t bear to see his loved one struggle to patch up an injury. Will sighed. Hannibal put the bloody gauze aside on the floor and opened the emergency kit. He took a sterile one, poured oxygenated water on it and cleaned the blood around the slash on Will’s cheek, until the wound was the only red on his face.

Will needed suture. Hannibal looked inside the kit and after a few seconds of moving things around inside the box, he pulled out a surgical thread and needle.  
Will gave him a pleading look, but didn’t say anything.

While Hannibal pulled the thread through the needle, Will gripped the fabric on his leg. Nails dug into the saltwater-tender skin of Hannibal's thigh, and he looked up at Will's face. His teeth were bared, clenched, and his knuckles were white on his other hand. Hannibal offered a small smile as he slid the needle into the lips of the cut. The needle went in and out, out and in, pulling hisses of pain out of Will as Hannibal expertly sutured him back together.  
“It’s almost over.” Hannibal said, as he closed the wound and cut off the thread. He disinfected the wound again and covered it with a large adhesive plaster, to be checked every five hours, changed if needed.

Hannibal stroked Will’s healthy cheek.  
“Now I can rest”, he smiled at Will, before lying back down on the bed. Will did the same.

They laid there together, right next to each other.

Fatigue finally caught up on Hannibal. He closed his eyes, tried to relax himself and focus on his surroundings. As the sound of thunder outside was becoming more and more distant, the rumbling of the waves crashing onto the shore made itself clearer. Its tumult blended with the cold air that seeped into the shack.  
Hannibal found himself back on the cliff next to his house, after the fight with Dolarhyde. Will’s hands, slick with the blood of their enemy, were tainting Hannibal’s hip and shoulder with a crimson shade. Will’s eyes met his as he breathed “It’s beautiful”, and the contrast between those beloved blue eyes and the red blood smeared on the face they belonged to struck Hannibal right in the chest.  
_My love_ , he thought, _wearing so well the clothes of a killer…_

They remained like this, faces dangerously near to each other, and for an instant, Hannibal thought Will would close the few inches separating their mouths and kiss him. Instead, Will let his head fall onto Hannibal’s shoulder. He then moved his arm up to the back of Hannibal’s neck, and pulled them both off the cliff’s edge and into the ocean.

Hannibal had no memory of what happened between that moment and when he woke up supported by Will’s arms in the water near the beach. He could recall the feeling of his beloved’s arms wrapped around him, holding on as tight as if their lives had depended on it. He could recall Will’s voice imploring him to wake up. Once again, Will could have chosen to save his own life, reach the land alone and leave Hannibal to drown. It would have been easy, and Will’s chance of survival without him would have increased. And yet, once again, he’d elected to help Hannibal at the peril of his own life.

The smell of firewood reached Hannibal’s nose, and opened his eyes. The room was warmer than before. He turned his head ever so slightly to his right, where Will was still resting, eyes shut.

He wanted to roll over, to take Will’s hand in his, to bring it to his lips and devour every knuckles with kisses. But the pain in his abdomen reminded Hannibal that he couldn’t move much, for the time being. Still, he needed more than knowing that Will was by his side, he needed to feel him there. So he made one last physical effort, and extended his hand on the bed to touch Will’s, their skin barely brushing.  
His dearest one shifted a little, ran his fingers along Hannibal’s palm, and finally interlaced their fingers together. The shadow of a smile appeared on Will’s lips, and Hannibal let out a quiet sigh of contentment. They both drifted off to sleep…

“Ooooh no no no no NO! SHIT!”

…Until their slumber was interrupted by a flow of profanities screamed by their host.  
They both tried to raise their head to see what was happening. Amina was bent over the monitors on her desk, desperately trying to turn them on. Hannibal felt a tremor in Will’s hand, and understood what he’d done. He gave Will a reassuring squeeze.

“Must’ve been a power cut”, Hannibal said to Amina.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi so it's the 27th of January, I haven't updated the fic in over a month, but I'm still working on it and the next chapters are coming, don't worry. If you've read until that note, I am so grateful for it and ily <3


	4. - A not-so-ordinary day -

Amina was tidying up the bathroom, putting some order into the boxes that Stabbyface-Guy had knocked down in his panic earlier.

Damn, she really needed the intruders’ names, just in case her tongue would slip and call one of them by the nicknames she’d come up with. She was well aware that it was in poor taste, and she wouldn’t risk a fight with her peculiar guests. Two more dead bodies on her conscious was more than she could take.  
Besides, she wouldn’t like it either if someone referred to her by her ugliest facial features.

Amina shook her head and stacked the weed box on the bottom shelf. Her instincts told her that with everything going on at the moment, she would need it soon. Better to have it in an easy-to-access space. 

She knew she wouldn’t get the men’s names by asking directly. She had tried, and they clearly had ignored her, pretending confusion.  
She’d have to come up with something to get them to talk. She’d thought that playing dumb, pretending that they had told her their names she’d simply forgotten them would work.

It did not.

The youngest of the two men had cut her short, reminded her that being injured was exhausting, that they could talk about it later. She briefly considered the possibility that they actually couldn’t remember their names, that whatever they’d been through had caused some kind of memory loss. That maybe there wasn’t any malice to them.  
And if there was some kind of malice to them –which was also highly probable, people usually don’t get stabbed in the face and shot in the guts for nothing–, having their names would allow the competent authorities to take care of them. Though, she had to admit she wasn’t too fond of the idea of cops barging in on her island.  
The further away they stayed from her, the better.

Although the storm was starting to move away from the island, the cold it brought was starting to get into the house, Amina could feel it in her bones. She put a cardboard box on a shelf. Tidying the bathroom could wait. What mattered at the moment was to not freeze to death. She went to the basement to pick up some twigs, some leaves and a couple of logs to put into the fireplace in the hallway. Amina pulled out a box of matches from her pocket, lit a match and started to light the twigs and leaves. Once the smoke rose up, she put a log on top of it. The shack would be warmer in an hour or so. That way, she and her uninvited visitors wouldn't get sick - or sicker. 

She went back to the bathroom and her cleaning. Stabby Face had made such a mess out of this room that it took Amina another couple of hours to put her boxes and folders back in order. She could feel the air grow warmer as she put the last cardboard box back into place. 

Alright. Now time to get back to her monitors. They suddenly appeared less boring to Amina, now that she actually had things to report. She fantasized the face the Boss would make when she’d tell her about the two strange men and how they appeared out of the blue on the island. Amina would give a physical description of the men to the Boss, and they’d work out together if anyone fitting the description had gone missing on the mainland’s coast, and the guys would be identified. Their families would be happy to get them back, and - oh. She had to ask them if they actually had families. Or family, singular. The only thing she was sure of was that these two weren’t simply friends, the idea that they had a family of their own wasn’t so unrealistic. Or maybe they didn’t have anyone at all.

Either way, she’d have to have a conversation with her guests at some point.  
But for now, the two injured men in the living room were resting on the bed, hands tangled together. She rolled her eyes at this, but couldn’t fight a small smile. She actually had missed having people around and these two, as strange as they were, made her feel less alone.  
Careful not to wake them up, Amina quietly sat down at her desk. 

“Oh, fuck.” she cussed under her breath.

The monitors were off. Screens pitch-black. When did that happen…?  
She never turned the power off, the sensors were supposed to be on at all times. Maybe that after ten months of having them on, they had overheated? Amina pushed all the buttons she found, thinking the screens would light up again. Nothing.

She fiddled with the plugs and wires, hoping that it would restart the system. Still nothing. She groaned, what kind of Coast Guard was she if she couldn’t turn her own equipment on?

The more unsuccessful her attempts, the more Amina’s frustration and anger grew. Of fucking course there had to be a blackout on the first day she got something interesting on the job.  
No. No. No and no. No fucking way.  
She was punching the keyboard before she realized it, swearing her heart out.  
“SHIT!” she heard herself shouting.

“Must’ve been a power cut”, the older of the two men said from the bed. 

Amina jolted at the sound and turned around. The man smiled politely at her. A cold shiver went down her spine. She knew his face, there was no doubt about it anymore. She didn’t know where she knew it from, but she’d definitely seen it somewhere before.  
Amina took a deep breath to regain some composure, then answered, calmly:

“Sorry, didn’t mean to wake you guys up… But yeah, that’s also what I’m thinking. Though it’s kinda weird, never had a blackout here before.”

She abstained herself from adding that she’d also never had any visitors here before them, the correlation being implicit.

“Today’s a special day, then.”

“Yeah I’d pop a bottle of champagne if I had one.” she joked. “By the way, are you guys hungry? Your misadventure must have been draining, I mean, if you got here by swimming, with all injuries, you’re probably as starving as you’re exhausted, right? I’ve got some dried fish and canned pasta, it’s not the tastiest thing in the world but it does the job.” 

The men exchanged a hesitating look. 

“We’ll be fine, don’t worry about this.” said Stabby-Face.  
It was a surprise that he could still speak, with his injury, but his tone was definitive enough that Amina didn’t insist. The dried fish was not very nutritious anyway, it wouldn’t help them much. 

It was barely noon, and given what her guests had been through, they surely needed more sleep than the few hours they’d got so far. Amina gave the men an awkward smile and handwave before leaving the room. She let them rest, left the room to sit in front of the fireplace. She closed her eyes to think.

She would bring the injured men some food, clothes or more medical supplies if they asked, she wouldn’t deny them help, of course, but their state didn’t really matter. Amina had to report them. If the power was gone, she’d have to find another way to contact the mainland, one that didn’t involve electricity. 

There was no mailing system on this island, no actual way to contact anyone without using her company’s channels on her computers - which was the whole fucking _point_ of this so-called promotion. The power wasn’t supposed to go out, her boss monitored her just as she was supposed to monitor this damn island.  
And she’d had many storms in the past ten months, some more dangerous than the one she’d seen today.  
Her suspicions about the intruders being related to the blackout became a certainty. One of them had messed with the fuses while she was distracted. Probably while she was tidying the bathroom or fetching the firewood in the basement. 

The basement. Didn’t she see some old radio back there earlier? 

She took a deep breath, jumped to her feet and headed back down.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi everyone! I hope you liked this chapter! I went through a bit of an artistic burnout in the past couple of months, and this chapter took a few rewrites and several proofreading by two different people. It was hard to get through to say the least, but I'm back on track! and while I don't think I'll be posting one chapter per week like I did for the first three chapters, I do have the next steps of the story planned and will finish it, I just... don't know when I'll update ^^"

**Author's Note:**

> Huge thanks to @PrincexPhoenix who proofread the first chapters of the fic <3


End file.
